Toward sculptris-like sculpting!

As my new year surprise for the community I will show you my recent advances in the subdivision algorithm for Unlimited Clay: now those ugly long and thin stretched triangles belong to the past! hope you like it 🙂

PS: before you ask, no, this is still not committed to my branch: there´s a bunch of issues not shown in this video that will prevent this for public usage yet but don´t worry, I´m working very hard to get as soon as possible a public build!

Best wishes for this new year!

Farsthary

note from the blog’s maintainer (Lapinou) :

Farsthary has been working on the unlimited clay algorithms during many monthes (so he doesn’t just tinker code, he also polishes it!): as often in the computer science world, developing a new feature follows the Pareto law : it takes 80% of the time to develop the 20% remaining stuffs (bug fixing, optimizations…), which explains why Farsthary is “only” posting “unlimited clay” stuffs in the mean time..moreover, he keeps learning new area of the blender code with limited help..

Thanks to the new skills in the mesh editing field he is learning, he will than be able to tackle the surface generation tool for fluid particles with more maturity (better designed code, etc)

As a gift for the new year, I suggest for those of us who are able and willing to, to save a extra few dollars (more is difficult because of the crisis, I know what I am speaking about (issues to find a job)) for him and offering a little donation:as an example, it can be translated in simply smoking or drinking less during a week for his sake.

If many of us do even a tiny donation (not optimal relative to paypal, but better than nothing), this will keep his living condition at the same level than the previous years. Thanks!!

im just trubled with it’s placement – the modifirie stack? thats because modifires are suposed to be un destructive and te options you change modifie the thing you’d like to do more like prush porps or something
a posible location could be in the toolbox and contexted in python to be visible only in sculpt mode

No, we still need a retopo tool. No idea how you got to that conclusion.
You can’t disable the OpenGL view in blender, everything in blender is drawn in OpenGL. Unless you mean “The 3D view”, but what does turning off the 3D view have to do with UC?

Hey, I just have a few suggestions, on what would make UC and your smoothing algorithm a little better. Hope you don’t mind:

1) Notice 4:57, where the blob is intersecting with the mesh, that line looks distorted. That is because some triangles are going against the ring. Would it be possible if UC would always make a clean ring around your brush, or automatically make a ring in sharp edge places (Such as the blob on the plane, or places where you used the crease brush). Sculptris doesn’t have that.

2) In the previous video, where you shown your smooth algorithms, i noticed that your “Shape preserving” algorithms do no preserve the shape very well on sharp objects, such as subdivided and triangulated cubes. Hows about if you make your smooth algorithm ignore smoothing faces which are 90 degrees or less with each other? Treat the edge between them as unselected.

About 2 , in that video only where the hard edges triangulation where not simetrical the shape was not preserving, I realized that after i made the video, bcause the automatic Blender triangulation does not always output an optimal traingulation, but in general if the force are balanced the shape will be preserved.

About 1) Seems like a blurry line because that blob was made with not high enough detail to capture the high frecuency of the sharp edge, but is easy to solve adding more detail to the brush.

Thanks for the reply.
However, Blurriness is not the problem, noise is 🙂
Look at these:
If UC could somehow rotate the edges that cause noise to orient to the crease, it would make it clean without adding to much polygons.
This would result in cleaner models with less polygons.

Donated – sorry it couldn’t be more: we’re all battlers, here. You’re very talented : you deserve whatever help we can give you. This is what makes Blender such an incredible programme:developers like *you*!!

I have a certain art style i’d like to bring into 3D, this will start to make it possible. With this development of unlimited, almost fractal like sculpting, i see new animation possibilities too.

two idea’s:

New brushes can be developed specifically for this kind of sculpting.

For instance, some ‘fill brush’ that bridges big gaps, in the video branches were extruded, so if you could mark an area on a branch then paint fruther one another, a bridging mesh is created. maybe i need to make some drawings… think wings between dragon arms like in Sintel.

An inflate brush already exists i suppose, to control the radius of those branches? generally it would mean 3d influence brushes, so working on a sphere instead of a projected circle.

then when the demo showed the circles being made, some algorithm could crea

Then when the demo showed the circles being made, some algorithm could create a new mesh that does’nt have overlap, like some realtime boolean merge.

Another idea is a way to easily select and rotate brances, for instance to make trees, ie to reorient stuff you draw out in a 2d plane. Or, with simultanious input of two mouses you could turn the view or ‘workplane’ while scuplting…

Maybe some automatic calcualtion of a ‘direction spline’ is possible, to use with certain tools and brushes.

I’d like to welcome Raul Fernandez to the 3D-Coat “core” development team, (not to steal a term or anything).

I felt, and Andrew felt and Stas felt that Raul is definitely “the man for the job”. Dynamic subdivision, I mean. At least, that will be his starting mission. But, you can expect a lot more from a guy of his talent.

Fasten your safety belts and get ready for the best. What a combination, what a team!

Maybe Raul, himself, will chime in here, to introduce himself more thoroughly.

<> Well, I hope Farsthary will say something to reassure the Blender community that this wasn’t just a ploy to get Raul a real job (much as he deserves it) but that the Blender community will benefit from what is being promised in this thread.

Seriously some people need to take a deep breath before writing and being afraid.

Most of the Blender develloper have a day to day job at other companies develloping tools/software that are in competition with Blender, and it doesn’t stop them from comitting. Raul is extremely talented, and a position like this will only help improve his programming skills even more, and in the end, as he said himself (and as Ton said on blendernation) it will benifit the blender community.

Chill out guys, Raul totally deserve to have a job where he can devellop his skills.

“Chill out guys, Raul totally deserve to have a job where he can devellop his skills.”
I agree completely. He did finally send out a reassuring note that he wasn’t under some NDA or non-competitive agreement where he wouldn’t be allowed to continue supporting Blender with his work. That sort of thing happens, you do realise.
Oh, and I completely agree that he needs to take opportunities when he can. None of us would do otherwise. He definitely deserves it.
Oh, and I’m not a guy. Girls do Blender too :o)

Many people said it before but I must say it too:
YOU ARE A GOD, MAN !! Incredible work!
The world needs such super talented people like you.
When I get my next wage I donate you as much as possible(I’m in apprenticeship, so I’m not rich).
And please – you other folks out there: Donate, he has truly deserved it!

PLEASE release a demo to the public! I am a fledgling modeler and am desperately looking for free software that i understand and this i understand! It sure beats trying to shell out for *cough*autodesk*cough* software…. If I ever make any money off of this I will be sure to donate a percent of it back to the Open Source community you guys are great!

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